Life is filled with things that are hard to understand. Two of them are faith and electricity.
According to folklore Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity when he flew a kite with a key on it during a thunderstorm (don’t try that at home!). Mr. Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it is still largely a mystery. What is it exactly? History records that in the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was considered “… a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.” Today we are more sophisticated. We have explanations of electricity like: “It is the energy conducted by electrons (subatomic particles) jumping around.” So, I guess that means electricity is made up of invisible things when they move really fast. Umm? We may not fully understand electricity, but I think we all believe in it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have flipped on that light switch this morning. Electricity can actually help us to understand what the Bible means by “faith” because both God and electricity are invisible. There is a tendency to think that faith is basically a positive feeling that everything is going to be alright, sometimes we call it hope. There are a lot of media preachers who push the idea that faith is a powerful way to persuade God to give you what you want. The Bible looks at faith much differently. Here is the difference. Biblical faith is in a Person, not in a result. William MacDonald, a Bible scholar, said it very clearly, “Faith is confidence in the trustworthiness of God. It is the conviction that what God says is true and that what He promises will come to pass.” Real faith is not a magical way to impose our will on God. Real faith trusts that what God says He will do. How can we know that God will do what He says? The answer is all around us. The same God who spoke the promises written in the Bible also spoke our world, solar system, and billions of galaxies into existence. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host…. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast” (Psalm 33:6–7,9). God has not only spoken to us through what He made, He has also spoken to us through Jesus Christ. That is why THE WORD is one of the names given to Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:1–3). Jesus not only came to earth, He made the earth. When we put our faith in Jesus Christ we are trusting that His sacrifice on the Cross is all we need to be set free from God’s wrath against our sin. God gives “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe…being justified [declared righteous] as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). When an appliance is plugged into the right (invisible) electric current, it can function the way it was made to operate. When we put our faith in Christ, then our hearts can see what we were made to see. Faith in God is not a leap into the dark. Faith in God produces a light that we never saw before.
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